Tutorial

Building Native Web Components with Vue.js

Published on March 16, 2017

Vue.js

Joshua Bemenderfer

Building Native Web Components with Vue.js

The Web Components / Custom Elements spec allows you to define your own custom elements in the browser and the logic attached to them. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s almost here. The advantage of Web Components is that they are interoperable between any framework or library, or even Vanilla JS. Thanks to Vue’s small size, with the help of a plugin, you can create native custom elements from Vue components.

Installation

Vue custom elements require the (appropriately named) vue-custom-element plugin.

Install it via Yarn or NPM.

# Yarn
$ yarn add vue-custom-element -D

# NPM
$ npm install vue-custom-element --save-dev

Additionally, unless you’re only building for Chrome, you’ll probably want the document-register-element polyfill.

Creating a Web Component

Write your component as you normally would, single-file components work fine if using a build system.

ExampleComponent.vue

<template>
  <p>Dynamic prop value: {{myProp}}</p>
</template>

<script>
export default {
  props: ['myProp']
}
</script>

Then, add the vue-custom-element plugin to Vue and register your component.

main.js

import Vue from 'vue';
import vueCustomElement from 'vue-custom-element';

import ExampleComponent from './ExampleComponent.vue';

// Configure Vue to ignore the element name when defined outside of Vue.
Vue.config.ignoredElements = [
  'example-component'
];

// Enable the plugin
Vue.use(vueCustomElement);

// Register your component
Vue.customElement('example-component', ExampleComponent, {
  // Additional Options: https://github.com/karol-f/vue-custom-element#options
});

Now, after building to a standalone script, you should be able to add that script to any webpage and have it render example-component as expected.

index.html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>My Example Vue Page</title>
    <script src="dist/build.js" async deferred></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <example-component myProp="I can pass props!"></example-component>
  </body>
</html>

Props will still be reactive, though you can’t pass values other than strings.

And there you have it! A custom element made with Vue!

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About the authors

Joshua Bemenderfer

author

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